Nice one Chris! I stumbled on needing to sharpen an image when reducing its size to keep it looking good but love these tips - tho don't have the kit (or likely to in near future) that you guys have so whatever i can do on the editing side is really helpful

spideyGirl wrote:Nice one Chris! I stumbled on needing to sharpen an image when reducing its size to keep it looking good but love these tips - tho don't have the kit (or likely to in near future) that you guys have so whatever i can do on the editing side is really helpful

Glad to be of assistance! There are two essentials one needs know about when post processing a digital image, one is UM the other is level manipulation. I'll write something up about that when an appropriate image shows up.

Thanks Chris, I'll give it a go when I have more time. (I have a choice of using Corel, the Canon program which came with the camera, or Picnik so I will give all three a try and see which is easiest/best)

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

Tiff and Bitmaps are completely unwieldy for on screen usage - the file memory sizes with TIFFs in particular are gi-normous and take ages to download online but are ideal for traditional print industry use rather than for PC display. Typically the resolution size of a TIFF image would be 300 - 600 dpi (dots per inch) rather than the more common 72-180 dpi for a JPEG or GIF format.

Bitmaps are again the trad print industry equivalent of the GIF and generally best for monochrome images, although you do get them on image optimisers for the web as they're good for grayscale or limited palette images like maps or diagrams Web developers used to call print typesetters and designers 'pixel weenies' because they worked with such enormous file sizes

"Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.” George Bernard Shaw

Tiffs are gorgeous for print offs though, particualarly for fine art prints JPEGs (and now PNGs although again they're hefty in file size at times) are by far and away the most versatile image formats for digital printing purposes in terms of storage as you can start high and crop right down without losing clarity whereas if you did that with TIFFs there'd have to be either massive memory capacity on photocards or the digital images would need to a whole lot smaller.

I use PNGs a lot for my Zazzle merchandise as they're kind of a halfway house choice between print quality and screen sharp imaging and even then I notice the image quality isn't always as good as you think it's going to be (mostly on T-shirt especially if you go for a cheapo one)

"Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.” George Bernard Shaw

ChristianBecker wrote:Chris, can't you set up your camera to take pictures in another format than jpeg? An uncompressed one like tiff or bmp should make the unsharp mask unnecessary.

I can set it to a RAW format instead of, or as well as, the fine JPG. I've tried RAW but the amount of work I had to do to get the image sorted (and it has to be saved as a JPG anyway to display it) didn't really get me a noticeably better result. The Sony JPG algorithm seems to do an adequate job. I could set the sharpening done in the camera to a higher level but then I couldn't undo it later. Thanks for the suggestion though.